Looks like the fruit lords and this forum have been good to me as my two year old dwarf Spring Satin Plumcot is loaded with delicious fruit! You can see the three styles of "protection" ( footies, cotton bag and green oragoma (sp) bags) being used in an experiment to learn about how well they keep bidrs/squirrels away and how long they take to apply and how many fruit are ruined in the process! The mockingbirds started feeding on them so I put out the bags. Right now many still have yellow flesh inside and are sweet/sour, but a few are ripening (red flesh) and are out-of-this-world sweet like a bing cherry! My flavor delight aprium just set a dozen fruit and estimate they will be ripe within 30 days. The stark bros plum and apricot that came with the order are loaded and will probably be ready to eat within 30 days as well. Your help and a little luck have been invaluable. Thank you.

All of the seeds are organic, and were harvested this season. To trade, I'd like colorful, or eye catching tomatoes, peppers (peter pepper?) Rose clippings, or angels trumpet clippings (especially double!) Message me if you have anything unusual, or particularly beautiful, or delicious :) I have: Rio Grande Hot Chile RARE, Heirloom A prolific and colorful, versatile 3" garden chile with fruits maturing from yellow to red. Slightly hotter than a jalapeno. Early Moonbeam Watermelon RARE, Heirloom This melon is so sweet and juicy that you can eat most of the rind too. It is an icebox size 5-8 lbs with butter yellow flesh and colorful dark and light green exterior. The small size make it perfect for a one sitting feast. This melon is well suited to short season climates as it will mature early Oaxacan Pink Tomato RARE, Heirloom Beautiful, clear pink, flat-round fruits with character and good flavor. Originally from Oaxaca, Mexico. Best trelllised. Thessaloniki Tomato RARE, Heirloom Developed in Greece. Round red fruit with mildly earthy, slightly acidic flavor resists sun scald and cracking. Indeterminate. Sweet 100 Tomato This garden favorite bears 100 or more small, sweet red tomatoes in clusters on long branches. Bursting with sugary flavor, Sweet 100s produce scarlet, cherry-sized fruits in long clusters right up to frost. Green Tomatillo Tomatillos, a staple in Mexican dishes, are used for fresh or cooked green sauces. Fruits give a citrusy, tart and tangy lemon flavor when picked firm. Red Cherry Pepper The Red Cherry sweet pepper has small roundish fruits about 1.5" across. The peppers are delicious either red or green and go great in salads. Also a great pepper for pickling. Banana Pepper The famous "Yellow Banana Pepper" is a big favorite for flavoring meat dishes and casseroles. Tangy, but not hot. Great in containers and sunny flower beds. Full size peppers can be picked at any color, but are spiciest when red. Orange Bell Pepper Beautiful blocky orange bells with thick, sweet walls color up early under the protective plant canopy. Harvest early fruit to encourage additional fruit set. Red Bell Pepper Sweet, juicy, classic 3-4” bell peppers that ripen from dark green to red on vigorous, upright plants. Excellent fresh, roasted, sautéed or stuffed. Jalapeno Most familiar in their green stage, jalapeños are hottest and fully ripe when they turn red. Use fresh, pickled, or in sauces. Sparky Marigold Sparky is not your ordinary marigold! It has a very unusual flower form that is wide and wavy. The colors are vivid shades of deep orange and yellow. It will remind you of a sunset. Maximilian Sunflower Maximilian sunflower is a perennial sunflower mainly found from Manitoba to Texas but it is also found scattered throughout the tall grass prairie. The flowers run about three inches across but there are a lot of them. They start blooming as early as the first week of September and continue for about 5 weeks. At the peak the top half of the plant is covered with these flowers for about three weeks making a very spectacular display. Naturally the bees love them and monarch butterflys like to stop by them on their way south. Finally the goldfinches feast on the seeds from mid-October to mid-November.

Hi RiverHendrix , Please take a look at my list, and see if anything interests you. I am interested in your: Wild Arugula Claytonia Watercress Hamburg Parsley Root Pak Choi Lacinto Kale Ruby Lettuce Saltwort ...and would also be interested in multiple trades of some of these. Thanks for looking. -Tina / kilngod Here is a link that might be useful: Kilngod's trade list

Hazel, I grow as much of our food as I can, and that means spending tons of time preserving the harvest (via canning, dehydrating, blanching/freezing and root cellar type storage) so we'll have home-grown produce year-round. I buy a mixture of organic/non-organic food from the grocery store. I'd love to buy only organic food but we have a budget to live within and it does not allow for only organic food. I do not know if non-organic foods are less healthy and will leave that debate to the food scientists. What I do know is that I'd rather eat food that was grown in the most natural way possible. For me, eating as much naturally-grown food as possible is a personal choice. I am a 16-year cancer survivor and as soon as I was diagnosed with cancer, I began eating only an organic vegan diet. The vegan part was really hard for me because I grew up in Texas and love meat, especially beef. My family wasn't crazy about a vegan diet, but put up with it (at least when they ate at home) for me. After about 6 months, I began adding meat and dairy back to our diet. We still eat healthier that we used to but not as healthy as we did during those six months. When the National Organic Standards Board was developing the standards to be used by certified organic growers, there was much debate and compromise. Some organic food advocates felt the standards were watered down and weren't completely happy with the standards as written and implemented. Some organic advocates were disappointed and felt the organic standards were too lax and were quite vocal about that. I watched the debate with interest. For me, though, I'd rather eat organically-grown food even if the standards under which it is grown are somewhat less than perfect. One reason I grow as much of our produce as I can is because that is the only way I know exactly what was or wasn't sprayed on it. If the choice is between a strawberry grown in our garden with no chemicals sprayed on it versus a conventionally-raised strawberry that may have been sprayed with various synthetic products from 1 to 3 times a week, guess which one I'd rather be eating? Just because a pesticide, herbicide or fungicide is organic in origin does not necessarily mean it is safer than a pesticide, herbicide or fungicide that is synthetic in origin. There are some organic products I've never used and never will use. I'm planting my 18th spring garden right now (my first was planted a year before we broke ground for the house), and I have used a synthetic pesticide once (last year, to save the garden from huge hordes of grasshoppers) and it almost killed me. I won't say I'll never use a synthetic pesticide again but I hope it will be another 18 years before I feel like that is the only option left to save my garden. I even use organic pesticides sparingly and, in fact, most years I don't use them at all. I use them very selectively and only for the worst of pests. Sometimes I'll spray neem oil, for example, on one specific plant that has a pest issue but won't spray the whole garden or even that whole row. I'd rather hand-pick and use other methods to remove the pests. I never spray Spinosad because it is a broad-spectrum pesticide that can harm some beneficial insects, but I'll use it in a granular product (Slug-Go Plus) that I sprinkle on the ground to kill pill bugs and sow bugs. I also use a granular organic fire any product that contains Spinosad. Other than neem and Spinosad, I sometimes use a product containing Bt 'kurstaki' on brassicas and that's about it. I mostly rely on our population of beneficial insects to help keep the pest levels low, and on hand-picking bugs or using floating row covers to exclude them from crops. I think that produce grown in the most natural way possible tastes better, and we all know that produce fresh from the garden is the best-tasting, healthiest food around. I like being able to harvest in the morning and then use some or all of that harvest in the meals we eat that day. And, on the list of what really matters, the use of synthetic pesticides bothers me the most. I have less of an issue with synthetic fungicides or fertilizers. I think every gardener has the right to grow their plants, whether ornamental or edible, in whatever manner they choose. I just choose to grow mine as naturally as I can. When I first transitioned from conventional gardening to organic gardening in the 1990s, I essentially kept gardening exactly as I always had with the only change being that I was substituting products that were organic in origin for those that were synthetic in origin. After moving here, I began to take steps to go beyond that and that was the beginning of my progression to go sort of beyond merely growing organicallyand focus more on gardening in the most natural and sustainable way. Whether you will be pleased with the winter squash/pumpkins you chose as fall decorations depends on whether you think all autumn pumpkin displays must include big orange pumpkins. I love all the C. moschatas for fall decorations because I like their various shades from buff-colored Seminole to the almost brownish-buff color of Musquee de Provence. For 7 or 8 years before the squash vine borers found us here, I always grew huge numbers of winter squash and pumpkins in all colors---including orange, yellow, white, buff, green and some that were speckled, splotched, striped or warted. It was fun while it lasted and they made great autumn displays, but the SVBs have made it impossible for me to have that wide variety of colors now, so I am content with the colors of the C. moschata group, which mostly are in a range of buff-colored shades. Having become used to what I have now in terms of sizes and colors, I am content with pumpkins that aren't traditional jack-o-lantern types. And, sometimes I want a big orange pumpkin in the fall and plop it down in the middle of the display with my home-grown ones. Dawn